Game Details

It's easy to write about games that can be compared to other games. "It's like Call of Duty, but in space," or "It's like Gran Turismo, but all the cars feel like they're made of styrofoam" or "It's like the tabletop game Labyrinth, but you're controlling a monkey in a plastic ball." The games that are the most fun to write about, though, are the ones where you struggle to come up with any suitable comparisons.

Sure, you can draw some links between Antichamber and games like Portal. Both games involve wandering through a sterile laboratory and trying to find your way out. Both involve using a gun that doesn't shoot bullets, but does help you find an exit indirectly. And both take place from a first-person perspective. But Antichamber's similarities to Portal—and to most other games—end there.

Understanding Antichamber means forgetting your understanding of pretty much everything you know about how the physical world works. First to go is the idea of object permanence that you developed as a baby. Turn around in Antichamber, and the hallway that was there a second ago can easily be a totally different room. Then the game starts to mess with your ideas of depth perception—you can fall for miles, only to end up just a few feet below where you started.

In Antichamber, two stairways going different directions can somehow end up in the same place, rooms can have more than four 90-degree corners, glass boxes can have different contents depending on the direction you look at them from, and hallways can somehow end up orthogonal to themselves. And yet it all seems perfectly natural somehow. All the space-bending technology happens seamlessly on the engine level, so you never actually actively see the world glitching out in front of you. It's easier to see in the video above than to explain in words, but hopefully you get the idea.

It sounds like chaos, but it slowly begins to make a strange sort of sense. As you lose yourself in the game's stark black-and-white walls (only occasionally broken by brilliant bursts of color), you begin to link new situations to similar but unique ones you saw earlier in the game. This is especially important when using your block-shooting gun, which starts out as a means to create platforms and hold open doors but soon evolves to shoot self-multiplying blocks that can snake around the room to solve puzzles. Pattern recognition is key, yet every puzzle is unique enough that the solution requires a slight rethinking of what came before it rather than simple repetition.

The best part of Antichamber's design is how it slowly teaches you its particular rules and counterintuitive interactions without once popping up a tutorial or simply telling you what to do. There are some cryptic hints to be found on posters lining the walls, but they usually come after you've already figured out how to solve a puzzle. This design can lead to some frustrating moments—there was one puzzle I fiddled with for a good hour before the solution finally hit me—but it makes it all the more satisfying when you manage to power through the game's own logic (and there are always online walkthroughs if you get too frustrated).

There's also an understated beauty to the game's overall message. There are no non-player characters and no spoken dialogue, but the game's puzzles and explicit messages form a sort of allegory for the nature of existence that is surprisingly powerful. Without giving away too much about the evocative ending, I'll say that the conclusion had me awestruck by its beautiful simplicity and questioning whether the game could have really ended any other way.

Though Antichamber isn't overly long (it took me about eight hours from start to finish), it doesn't feel short, either. It feels complete—a wholly original puzzle game without much filler or any underdeveloped ideas. For those looking for something truly new and unique in indie gaming, this is a must play.

Promoted Comments

Even though the article mentions using a walkthrough, I strongly recommend against it. The game IS the puzzles. If you use a walkthrough you've cheated yourself as you can never get back the opportunity for discovery.

Like the game's creator recommends: if you get stuck on a puzzle, teak a break and let your subconcious figure it out. There were a number of times where I woke up in the middle of the night with a solution to one of the puzzles.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area.